The site has been developed for CMS Business Information to market a wide range of management reports and market surveys. This is a full electronic commerce site with catalogue software and secure payment facilities.

The site currently has thousands of publications which are categorised and sub-categorised into different indexes.  Each product page can contain links to

• Detailed descriptions of the product
• A pdf brochure  or sample issue
• A table of contents

Each publication may be delivered in different forms (eg paper, CD ROM) which have different prices and which may or may not be VATable.¹

We went to some lengths to design for search engine optimisation (SEO) which is the main source of business.   The site uses our proprietary e-commerce software. 

In the back office the clint has an upload utility which allows them to upload spreadsheets containing product information.  Because the spreadsheets come from publishers they have different formats, so we had to design a mapping program to allow us to map the columns in the spreadsheet to fields in our database.

We continue to develop the site which has a significant turnover.

1. Generally electronic delivery is VATable, so reports often have one VATable price and a different variant with another non-VATable price.